


The Good Heart

by Emnot



Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: F/M, baird is a cinnamon roll, wilina is a BAMF
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:41:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26519932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emnot/pseuds/Emnot
Summary: “Should we talk about what just happened?” Baird asked, voice very low.“Talk about how an eleven-year-old child opened a doorway to divine power?” said Myles. “Or talk about how that child did so to save the prince from an unnatural disease sent to disable the line of succession? Or talk about how that child is likely now a prime target for whoever sent it?”“We could talk about how we’re not referring to that child as a boy, right now,” offered Baird, and Myles took a sharp breath."For that child’s sake, we should talk about none of this.”_______________SOTL through POTS from the realm's Chief Healer, who has a very good heart. Also, Wilina.
Relationships: Alanna of Pirate's Swoop and Olau/George Cooper, Alanna of Pirate's Swoop and Olau/Jonathan of Conté, Baird of Queenscove/Wilina of Queenscove, Yukimi noh Daiomoru/Nealan of Queenscove
Comments: 76
Kudos: 315





	1. a premise

The first time it happened, Baird hadn’t been aware of it, because he had only been a few minutes old. But the story went that Baird’s mother, the Duchess Edith of Queenscove, had been bleeding out after the birth, and even her husband — a prodigious healer — couldn’t staunch it. Then someone set the infant on Edith’s chest and he emitted a dark green flash. When the shrieking died down, everyone realized that Edith’s bleeding had stopped. Baird’s father sat down heavily and looked at his newborn. “Who told you to do that?” he asked, and baby Baird yawned.

As soon as Baird was old enough to control his Gift and understand death, his father took him to clinics in the Lower City and the sick bay in the palace and the healing wards in the temple district. He worked on the simple things — cuts and colds and whatnot. This was when he first met his cousin Lianne of Naxen, ten years older. She looked at Baird’s father and frowned prettily.

“Uncle, he’s nine,” she said.

“Nine with the power of a grown man,” said Baird’s father, washing his hands. “Baird, influenza is trickier than a cold. You’ll need to be sure to check their bowels and not just their lungs.”

Lianne, who was being seriously courted by the Crown Prince of Tortall and had some spine as a result, put her hands on her hips. “Do you give him _any_ chance to be a child?”

Baird looked between the two of them and didn’t say anything. His father paused, and made a political assessment.

“Do you deem that important, Lianne?” he asked carefully.

Lianne lifted her delicate chin and looked at Baird’s father with the gaze of someone who knew she would be Queen one day. Her usually gentle eyes were firm. “I do.”

After that, Baird had less to do. Instead of rounds with patients, Lianne took him horseback riding and set him up with an arms master to learn sword fighting and introduced him to the Crown Prince. Roald could barely stop looking at Lianne with huge, loving eyes long enough to greet him. At their wedding the next year, Lianne dressed Baird in a smart outfit and had him carry the rings to the altar.

The year after that saw the recurrence of the green flashes. The first was on his mother, after she’d fainted on the stairs and broken her neck. Baird had seen her topple, and seen the moment of impact. The resulting burst of light left a maid with spots in her eyes for days; but the Duchess Edith stood up from her fatal fall like nothing had happened. The second was when his little sister had gone swimming in the lake out back at Fief Queenscove and lost her strength. A footman dove in and towed her limp body to shore. Baird heard the shouts and came running, and as soon as he took her little face in his hands there was another green flash and she rolled over and hacked up a tremendous amount of lake water and snot and proceeded to be fine. The last was on his beloved cousin Lianne, whose miscarriage had led to hemorrhage. Roald’s loving eyes were full of panic. Baird stood by the bedside and took Lianne’s hands and nearly set the curtains on fire with the force of his Gift exploding out of him. Lianne sat up for the first time in days and asked for something to eat and Roald burst into tears.

The problem with all of these flashes was that he couldn’t control them, and he couldn’t predict them. They surprised him as much as they surprised anyone else. His father took him to see the young scholar Myles of Olau, who pointed out that all the people Baird had healed in this way were related to him, and perhaps it had something to do with blood, and that in the meantime a university was a very good place for a boy with Baird’s talent and smarts.

Baird was accordingly enrolled, and spent the next eight years in medical study.

He loved every moment. Bodies were fascinating, and unruly, and each one of them was different. He never understood why the diagrams of skeletons in his textbooks were so precise. People were so much better and stranger than drawings. He spent as much time as he could doing practical rotations and as little time as he could with his nose in books.

The green flashes didn’t come back, and Baird’s strength and focus grew. When he was eighteen, he delivered now-Queen Lianne of her only child, a son they named Jonathan. Lianne announced that Baird was to be made the private healer to the Royal Family. The university hastily handed him its highest credentials and sent him out the door. Five months later his little sister, gray in the face, arrived at his rooms in the palace to tell him there had been a carriage accident, and that Baird was Duke.

Baird wept on Lianne’s shoulder for the loss of his parents. She put Jonathan in his lap. The baby waved his little princely fists and gazed up at Baird with his big blue eyes. Baird held him and kissed his cheeks and when he’d calmed down he handed the baby back to Lianne and went to figure out how to run a fief.

He had help. Myles of Olau was a bit of a drunkard but frighteningly intelligent. Baird’s friend from university Harailt of Aili helped find trustworthy folk to put the estate in order and keep everything running smoothly.And Ilane of Seabeth and Seajen, who was about Baird’s age and his favorite dance partner at court parties, contributed her prodigious mathematical abilities to reviewing accounts with him.

“Should we get married?” he asked Ilane one day, over a stretch of papers in the library of the Queenscoves’ townhouse in Corus.

Myles, ostensibly chaperoning but actually napping in the sun, snorted.

Ilane cut her eyes at Myles. “Hush, you.” She looked back at Baird. “No, we shouldn’t.”

Baird rested his chin in his hands, feeling just a little plaintive. “Are you sure?”

“I’m very sure,” said Ilane firmly. “We make very good friends. We would make terrible spouses.”

“Mostly because Ilane is in love with that little Mindelan fellow,” yawned Myles.

Ilane turned slightly pink. “How do you know about Piers?”

Myles smiled and said nothing. Ilane huffed and returned her attention to the Queenscove wheat accounts. Baird sighed and did the same.

“Please don’t stop spending time together, though,” said Myles after a moment, opening his eyes to look at them earnestly. “Everyone thinks I’m doing two noble bloodlines a tremendous favor by keeping them pure until matrimony can be established. I love being thought of as altruistic.”

Ilane rolled her eyes at him. But they continued to meet a few days a week, until Piers and Ilane did indeed marry, and then she went to Mindelan in the far northwest aglow with happiness. Baird was not the only young man at the palace bereft at her departure.

Baird spent about four years as private healer to the Royal Family. There really wasn’t much to do beyond monitor Lianne’s asthma. Roald was healthy if sedentary, and Jonathan had only the occasional sniffle as he grew up. The light workload meant he could spend as much time as he wanted doing what he’d done as a child and as university student: regular rotations throughout the city, sometimes going further afield if Lianne was doing well. He learned about local allergies and built systems for little villages to dispose of waste safely and found new tricks for stopping sexually transmitted infections. Occasionally he gave lectures at the university or led practicum courses, ignoring the mutters from his fellow aristocrats that it was hardly suitable for the Duke of Queenscove to be dragging students to muck around with the sick of the Lower City. “This is where the learning happens,” Baird told his students, some of whom were older than he was, all of whom knew he was the youngest Master Healer the university had ever produced. “It happens here. Not in a book, in a body.”

The winter Baird turned twenty-five, he received a summons from King Roald.

Roald was sitting behind his desk. He motioned for Baird to sit.

“Linley of Disart died last night,” Roald said.

Baird blinked. Linley had been Chief Healer for decades. Baird had hardly seen him; the man had barely left his library, let alone done fieldwork. He murmured the usual condolences.

Roald waved the condolences away. “Baird, I’m appointing you Chief Healer.”

“Oh, no thank you,” said Baird immediately. “I’m not good at politics.”

“I beg to disagree,” said Roald, in his mild way. “You are _very_ good at politics. You have convinced the Merons, the Rosemarks, and the Jesslaws to build sewage systems. You and Harailt of Aili have quietly overhauled the curriculum for final-year medical students at the university. And last year, when Eustace of Runnerspring assembled a coalition to reverse the custom of providing healers for one’s serfs and servants, you had a very public and very persuasive talk with him.”

“I appreciate your Majesty’s knowledge of these affairs. But, no thank you. I’m too young. You’ll need someone with more experience.”

“Baird, in your case, youth and inexperience are not related. You went into the university when you were ten years old. By fifteen you were better than your teachers. We talked about sending you to Carthak for more study, then realized they’d want to keep you, and you know how I like to avoid war.” Roald straightened a paper on his desk. “It does, however, seem that you need a little more experience in recognizing the difference between an invitation and and order.”

Baird looked at him. Roald was called _The Peacemaker_ , but he was Jasson’s son, still. The king raised his eyebrows. Baird cleared his throat. “Your Majesty, I accept.”

Roald sat back and smiled. “Oh, good. Lianne will be so pleased. Your first assignment is to go visit my father’s favorite general, Emry of Haryse, who by all reports is determined to pneumonia himself into an early grave.” He handed Baird a letter of introduction. “Please go do what you can to get him to sit still for a few months.”

Baird went.

Roald’s assessment had been right. Emry of Haryse, who had led The Old King’s empire-building conquests into Barzun, was not inclined to sit still. Baird pushed his way through the layers of old healing magics that blanketed Emry’s insides after years of injury and diagnosed a lung disease that should have been caught months before. He did what he could with it, ignoring the way the general resisted his work.

Afterwards, Baird cleaned his hands and gave his instructions. He was in the middle of telling the general very firmly that riding out-of-doors in cold weather was absolutely forbidden until his lungs could heal when he was drowned out by a shriek and sudden commotion outside the window. Emry lurched to his feet and seized the casement. His eyes narrowed. “That cursed child,” he snapped.

Baird looked over Emry’s shoulder. A story below them, people were rushing to cluster around a luminous billow of gray silk. Baird could see one leg emerging from the billow. It laid at a stark and unnatural angle against the snow. Even from here he could diagnose a diagonal fracture of the tibia and fibula.At the far end of the stable yard, a horse danced away from the man-at-arms chasing after it. Cause of injury assumed.

He was down the stairs, moving quickly, feeling vaguely grateful for the weather. Whoever was injured would feel slightly less pain in the cold, but would need to be moved inside to avoid frostbite.

Emry was right behind him. He was just as fast with a lame leg and bad lungs as Baird was thirty years younger. “I told her not to ride that horse. She’s never listened to me, not _once_ —“ they emerged into the yard, and Emry waved his cane. “Move out of the way!” he ordered, gesturing towards Baird. “Wilina!“

The little cluster of people parted. Baird’s heart went suddenly into his throat.

There was a beautiful woman in a gray silk gown reclining on the snow. She was very tall, and had brown hair and exquisite dark eyes that looked just like Emry’s, and her leg was definitely broken in at least one spot. She was cradling one hand in the other in a way that said to Baird: compression fracture. There was sweat beading at her temples, and she was pale with pain. She looked up at her father. “No one’s allowed to kill that horse,” she snapped.

“We’ll talk about that later,” said Emry.

“No, we’ll talk about it now. She’s going to be a beautiful horse. It’s not her fault no one trained her sooner.”

“That horse just _threw_ you —“

“I’m _fine._ ”

“I’d like to be the judge of that, if I may,” Baird managed to say, firmly ordering his heart back down into his chest.

Two sets of dark eyes looked at him. Emry waved a hand. “Baird of Queenscove. New chief healer. The king sent him to tell me to stop having fun.”

Wilina’s mouth twitched. “Did he.” She extended her broken hand to Baird, in a gruesome parody of a courtly gesture, and raised her lovely eyebrows. “Wilina of Haryse. The poor attitude is genetic.”

Baird, feeling slightly dazed, knelt on the snow and took her delicate, smashed hand very gently in one of his and rested his other hand on her leg. Her skin was warm and soft and up close she smelled like oranges and cotton. He just meant to do an initial diagnosis and check that his assumptions were correct, but as soon as he started to slip into her body he realized he might be terribly in love and lost his control completely.

There was a great flash of green that melted the snow in a six-foot circle around Wilina and Baird. By the time he blinked to clear his eyes her leg had straightened out, perfectly healed.

The stable yard went silent.

Wilina smiled.

She gently wiggled her now-uncrushed fingers in his palm and said, very quietly, “your Grace, you’re being awfully forward with your affections —“ and Baird realized he still had his hand on her bare leg, in front of everyone, in front of her _father_. He snatched it back and started to murmur an apology but she muttered “stop it. I’m teasing you. Pull me up.”

He stood, and pulled her up by her newly healed wrist, and glory she _was_ tall, and straight-backed, and once they were both upright she shifted her grip so she could hold Baird’s hand and turned to look at her father and said: “he’s staying for dinner.”

They were married in less than six months.

(Baird went to Myles and said what had happened and Myles smiled and said he’d always had a suspicion that Baird’s flashes might be about love.)

Loving Wilina was so easy and also marriage was _work_. Baird said as much to Lianne one day. The Queen laughed. “Do tell,” she said, eyes dancing. Baird started to say that if he and Wilina could just live out in the countryside and do whatever they wanted, it would be so much easier, but here in Corus with the weight of the Queenscove duchy on their shoulders and the eyes of the aristocracy on their backs —

Then he caught Lianne’s raised eyebrow, and decided that the Queen of all people was not exactly the person to complain to about being in the public eye. He stopped talking.

His cousin patted his arm, which she was delicately holding as they took a turn through her rosebushes. “It will get easier over time,” she told him kindly. “And Wilina is a natural at all the politics.”

This was true. Wilina ignored the whispers about her motherless upbringing and her mannerless military father and swept into function after function weighted with the Queenscove emeralds, tall at Baird’s side. She could have the whole room eating out of her hand in half an hour. Watching her work made Baird weak in the knees. Sometimes, in bed together after nights like those, he made her keep the emeralds on.

“Better her than I,” he murmured.

“You seem to be handling your own politics very well,” pointed out Lianne.

“I work for the good of the public health,” said Baird. “I don’t do anything political.”

“The arguments you get into with the conservatives would seem to belie that, dear,” said Lianne.

“Oh, Wil writes me scripts for those,” said Baird.

Lianne smiled. “And how much do you have to edit those scripts?”

Just last week Wilina had tried to convince him to follow up the talking point of _just because letting people die is affordable doesn’t mean it’s acceptable_ (with which he agreed) with _you stone-hearted, clay-brained, clod-footed imbecile_ (with which he _also_ agreed, but knew he couldn’t say to the Baron of Marti’s Hill). But Baird was a loyal husband. “Not a single word,” he told the Queen, straight-faced, and she laughed.

Baird had emptied out Linley of Disart’s fusty libraries, sent the volumes to the medical college, and turned the rooms into a healing ward for the palace staff. He’d taken an adjoining room for his own office. Prince Jonathan, now in page training, stopped by regularly to say hello. He would bring his young friends after they’d been clobbered in the usual page brawls, but were too embarrassed to be seen going to the pages’ healer.

“There is no shame in seeking relief,” Baird told each of them, over and over, healing their split lips and black eyes and sprained wrists. Eventually it got through their thick heads, and the flow of boys slowed to a trickle.

But one year Jonathan started bringing one younger boy in particular. Alan of Trebond was a tiny redhead with unusual violet eyes and, based on his repeat injuries, a tremendous aptitude for picking fights. Baird inspected Alan’s knuckles for the sixth time in as many months. Jon leaned against the wall and looked on with amusement. “You just don’t know how to let things go, do you, fire-top,” he said.

Baird raised his eyebrows at Jonathan. “I’m sure that’s a skill _you_ can impart,” he said, just on the line between mild and sarcastic. It was a line he could walk, given that he was nearly an uncle to the prince; and the prince himself was self-aware enough to know that he’d inherited a virulent strain of his mother’s stubbornness. Jonathan grinned.

“Trust me. Compared to Alan, I’m a priestess of the Merciful Mother. What was the insult today, Alan?”

The boy kicked his heels against Baird’s examining table. “Someone cut me in line,” he muttered.

Baird lowered Alan’s hand. “Good grief, lad, that is hardly worth a fight.”

Alan glared at him. “Well, it escalated.”

Jonathan laughed. “ _You_ escalated it.”

Baird listened to them talk back and forth, Alan grumbling, Jonathan gentler and more mature than Baird had ever heard him. This friendship was a solid one. By the time he’d fixed Alan’s hands, the younger boy was in a begrudgingly better mood. Baird let them both go with an admonishment to stay out of trouble, and watched Jonathan sling an arm around his small friend’s shoulders as they left.

Baird’s workload ebbed and flowed depending on the amount of resistance his peers gave to his projects. He had to sleep in his office a few nights a week for nearly a month while he convinced the university to send its most advanced students on year-long residencies in rural areas. One night, after that month was done, he came home to find his wife in the dining room of their townhouse with another man.

There was a brace of candles lit on the empty table. Wilina was standing at one end. At the other end stood the man. He was tall, and young. He wore a simple shirt, undone at the neck with the glint of a gold chain tucked inside, and well-worn breeches and soft boots. His thick brown hair was swept back from his face.

He stood in Baird’s dining room like he owned it. He looked at Wilina like he might own her, too.

Baird raised his eyebrows.

“Come in and close the door behind you,” said Wil, voice low, not looking at him.

Baird did. When he walked to Wilina’s side, she cleared her throat. “This is my husband, Duke Baird of Queenscove,” she said to the man, clasping her hands in front of her.

“Evenin’,” drawled the young man. He didn’t bow.

“And how shall I introduce you?” asked Wilina, a little pointed.

“However you like,” he said, easy, eyes glittering.

Wilina pressed her lips together, and then turned to Baird. “This is… Master Cooper. Of the Lower City. He has some information for you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> non-canon eye color for wilina because why not


	2. baird is the dr. fauci of tortall

Baird glanced between them. “What kind of information?”

“There is a sickness spreadin’ in Corus,” said the young man. He set a rolled sheaf of papers onto the table. “I know your city healers have told you about it. But they don’t know everything they need to.” He slid the papers towards Baird. “They don’t know this.”

Baird unrolled the papers. Each was a detailed map of a different neighborhood, covered in lines, dates, and dots of colored ink. He organized them into a grid until they covered the entire table in a perfectly-scaled rendering of Corus. At the bottom of the stack of papers, on a separate sheet, was a key to the colors and lines:

_Shared household._

_Shared place of work._

_Shared place of worship._

_Healthy._

_Sick - Mild._

_Sick - Severe._

_Dead._

The map told a terrible story. An outbreak of a mysterious illness had started three weeks ago when a shipment from a Carthaki trader had come up the Olorun on a longboat. It had spread through Upmarket first, and then into the temple district, and was now on both sides of the river and deep into the Lower City. There was transmission not just within households, but at workplaces and houses of worship. One temple alone looked to have spread the disease to nearly sixty people.

His healers _had_ told him something. There had been tales of strangely ill folk at the few clinics in the Lower City Baird had been able to afford this year. The patients were pale and weak and soaked in sweat, with a fever no tonic could cut. They were young and old, some with underlying conditions and some not. “It’s odd,” Adarie of Macayhill had told him two days ago, washing her hands next to him in the palace’s sick wing. “But perhaps just some new strain of influenza. Those come and go.”

At the bottom of the key sheet was a tally. As of that morning, there were eight hundred sick, most of them severely, and over a hundred dead.

This was not influenza. This was something else. The city was in trouble.

Baird sank into a seat.

Wil’s dark eyes darted over the map. She looked up at the young man. “George,” she said, voice hushed.

“I told you,” he said.

“This is highly advanced contact tracing,” said Baird slowly. “How were you able to get all this information? How do you know it’s accurate?”

The young man’s hazel eyes shifted and shimmered. “I have a network. And there are punishments for lyin’ to me.”

Something about the way he said it made Baird believe him. He looked back down at the maps. “What was the shipment from Carthak?” he asked. “If it was spoiled meat, or poisoned grain, we could —“

The man shook his head. “It was opals. Paid for in cash, by a man my people had never seen before. Gallan by his accent. He was dead the next morning and the opals were gone.”

“Patient zero,” said Baird. “Is he on the map?”

“He didn’t die of the sickness. He was beheaded.”

“Ah,” said Baird, and swallowed. He scanned the key again, noting the ink colors and their corresponding meanings more closely. He paused. A shiver prickled up his spine. He set his fingertip gently over _Dead_.

“Is there a reason you chose green for the dead ones?” he asked, carefully.

The young man smiled. His eyes were hard. “Because, _your Grace_ , I lay them at your feet.”

Wilina gripped Baird’s shoulders. “You can’t blame him,” she snapped.

“I can blame the system he heads, which closes clinics and leaves the poorest to die on street corners,” shot back the man.

Baird put his face in his hands for a long moment. He could feel Wilina steaming behind him. “Leave it, Wil,” he said, voice muffled. “He’s not wrong.” He leaned back in his chair and pinched the bridge of his nose. _Politics_ , he thought. “I let Roald give half the year’s budget for the city healers to the Cult of the Gentle Mother because Lady Agnes of Marti’s Hill threw a fit and said I wasn’t doing enough for women. I thought they were right. I didn’t know they’d spend it all on pamphlets telling girls to not have sex out of wedlock.”

“Conservatives,” muttered Wil, disgusted.

“ _Nobles_ ,” countered the man.

There was a long moment of silence in the room.

Finally Baird cleared his throat. “Can I keep these maps?”

“Consider them a gift,” said the man, somehow regal and casual at once.

“And from whom shall I say this gift came?” asked Baird, trying to stay mild.

The man smiled, and gave a catlike blink. His eyelashes were long. “Say it’s from a friend of your wife’s.”

Wilina muttered something under her breath. Baird felt an awful, sneaking suspicion, and swallowed it. “Very well.”

The young man nodded. “I’ll send updates when I have them.” He leaned forward, just slightly. “I will work with you on this. I can get information you can’t. But know that if more clinics don’t open up in the Lower City, I’ll send the sick and dead in wagons to the throne room itself.”

Baird thought about telling him that there were walls around the palace, and that there were guards on those walls, and that one could not just send in a cartload of corpses. Then he looked at the young man’s glittering eyes, and rethought it.

As if he could read his mind, the man nodded. “Goodnight to you both. Also, Wilina —“ Baird stiffened at the use of his wife’s first name — “be honest with him.”

Wilina still had her hands on Baird’s shoulders. But he felt her nod.

Baird waited to hear the usual noise of a guest leaving House Queenscove — footmen, formal murmurs, an affair of cloaks and carriages being summoned. But the only sound was a door opening and then closing again.

“Let’s go upstairs,” said Wilina softly.

Baird nodded.

In their bedroom, Wilina sat down at her dressing table. Baird sat by the fire. Their eyes met in her mirror.

Baird didn’t have to ask the question aloud.

“His name is George Cooper,” she said quietly, starting to remove her earrings. “He’s eighteen years old. He lives in the Lower City. His mother used to be a priestess at the Temple of the Goddess in Prettybone, until she had him.”

“That’s not what I want to know,” said Baird.

“I’m getting to that part,” Wil told him, dark eyes sharp in the reflection. “Do you know an inn called the Dancing Dove?”

Baird shook his head.

“It’s in the Lower City. It is generally considered to be the seat of Tortall’s… extra-legal system. It houses what’s called the Court of the Rogue.” She paused to take off her necklaces. Baird watched her long fingers undo the clasps at the nape of her lovely neck. Then she set her hands flat on her dressing table. “George Cooper is its king.”

Baird blinked several times.

“That young man who was in our dining room is the King of the Thieves?”

Wil pulled out a few hairpins, and nodded.

“Wilina,” said Baird, feeling slightly faint, “he is wanted by the Lord Provost. And furthermore, how do _you_ know him?”

“Do you remember a few years ago when we had to put a latch on the windows to my library?”

Baird blinked again. He did remember. Wilina had gone into her small library, which opened out onto the garden, late one night just in time to see a figure dive out through the window. She’d lit the candles and discovered that a few volumes of military strategy authored by her father were missing. They’d put a latch on the windows and stationed a guard out in the garden for a few nights, but no other break-in attempts were made. Three weeks later, Wilina came home with the books under her arm. A teenage boy in the Lower City had come up to her in the market, handed them to her, winked, and disappeared.

“That was him?”

Wilina nodded again. “I’ve seen him a few more times after that. Last year I was on my way to give alms at the temple in Upmarket when he came out of nowhere to thank me for ‘loaning’ him Father’s books, and to say that he’d become King the night before, due in no small part to the strategy he’d learned. He was so bruised up I almost didn’t recognize him.” She undid her blouse and drew it off her shoulders. “And it’s been a few times since then, too. Always outside, always brief. Always —“ she waved a hand. “Well, you just met him. Like that.”

Baird stood up and paced. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

She carefully folded and smoothed her blouse. “I was worried,” she said, voice low. “I didn’t want anyone to connect the two of you and sully your name, somehow. You’re the Duke of Queenscove. He’s the most wanted man in Tortall.”

“ _You_ are the _Duchess_ of Queenscove.”

Wilina smiled wryly. “I am still, to most people, Emry of Haryse’s wayward daughter, inclined towards breaking bones and taming horses, whose successful marriage remains an inexplicable miracle. I have a few more years before anyone thinks of me as the Duchess of Queenscove.” She picked up her hairbrush. “I think I have to bear you an heir first,” she added absently.

Baird sat down heavily on the side of the bed, lost in thought. Wilina looked at him in the mirror again. “Are you upset with me?” she asked quietly.

“No, actually,” he said, and smiled. “I’m relieved. I thought you might be having an affair with him.”

Wil dropped her hairbrush.

“ _What?_ ”

Baird winced. There was a particular tone of voice Wil used when he was about to be in trouble as a husband.

“I said, I thought you might be —“

“I heard what you _said,_ ” she snapped, and then all of a sudden she was crossing the room. She shoved him back onto the bed and then climbed on top of him, straddling his hips and gripping his shoulders. Her tremendous volume of petticoats billowed around them both. “Baird of Queenscove, what is _wrong_ with you?”

“I just thought — the way he looked at you, and I know I haven’t been —“

“Haven’t been _what_?”

“I haven’t been…” Baird couldn’t look at her. He thought of the nights he spent in his office. “Attentive.”

Wil said a series of words that were not, strictly speaking, within a Duchess’s vocabulary. “ _Listen_ to me,” she snapped. “You are the love of my _life._ You are, furthermore, the _only_ person I am interested in having sex with. Everyone else in this forsaken country numbs my nether regions with their dullness. _You_ , meanwhile, need only look at me sideways across a room or do something competent with your wonderful hands, and I have to go change my underskirts. _Do you understand me?_ ”

Baird felt himself blushing fiercely. He was acutely aware of the way her thighs were pillowing around his hips. “Yes, Wilina.”

“I cannot believe you,” she told him. Her half-undone hair was slipping down around her bare shoulders. He could see the curves of her beautiful breasts disappearing under the neckline of her bodice. “I chose _you_. I chose you _after_ you had this job. I knew what this marriage was going to be like and _I wanted it._ I wanted _you_. If you think anything else is the truth you can go —“

Baird kissed her. She said the last, profane part of her sentence against his mouth and then kissed him back fiercely. She was warm and soft and deliciously heavy and Mithros, he wanted to be inside her. He broke the kiss and said as much. She laughed, and leaned up, and shifted some of his clothes and some of hers, and made it happen.

Afterwards, still almost fully dressed, they laid next to each other, panting.

“I love you,” said Baird, catching his breath.

“I love you too,” said Wil. Then she put her hand to her throat. “Oh. Baird, I’d taken off my pregnancy charm.”

Baird looked at the ceiling. He thought about the maps he’d left on the dining room table, which foretold months of death. He took Wilina’s hand.

“Well, should we see if we can’t have a little life amidst all that’s to come?” he asked, and she smiled.

Five weeks later there were sixteen hundred cases and three hundred dead, including three healers who had succumbed to exhaustion. Wil found Baird at his desk at home, eyes red with reading charts and writing frantic letters. She gently took his hands and placed them on her stomach. Baird let his Gift seep through her and found just the barest smudge of something forming in her womb. He rested his forehead against her chest and tried to breathe through a multitude of emotions.

“I know it’s early, but I am taking this as proof that life does indeed go on,” Wilina said above him, and stroked his hair. He cried into her dress for a few moments, feeling both elated and terrified. Then they proceeded to have the worst and loudest fight of their entire marriage. Baird insisted that for safety’s sake Wil get out of a diseased city and go to her father’s, and Wil informed Baird that if he thought she would leave his side in this moment that he was an imbecile, and things continued to escalate until George Cooper opened the door without knocking.

Baird was too exhausted to be surprised by his arrival. George had more charts under his arm, and bad news: the disease was cropping up in places it had no right to. He thought they might need to start testing the water supply. Wilina sat mutely on Baird’s desk.

After George left, she looked at him.

“I should go to my father’s, shouldn’t I,” she said quietly.

 _“Please_ ,” said Baird.

They had one more night together, where Baird hardly let her sleep for wanting to hold her and taste her and bury himself inside of her. She left in the morning.

The disease reached the palace two weeks later. And in less than a month, Baird was summoned to Lianne’s side.

“So you see,” said his cousin, her fair skin paper-white, her hair lank with sweat. “I’ve been accused many times of being old-fashioned. But look at me now! Right on trend.” She coughed weakly, smiling.

Baird sat holding her hand, letting his Gift spiral into her slowly. Her illness was like all the others: shifting, unusual, no clear source, not acting the way diseases acted, picking odd parts of the body to chew away at. The more he sank his Gift into it the more it evaded him. When he released her hand he felt like he’d been sapped.

“You are the Queen,” he informed Lianne, handing her a tea into which he’d mixed a powerful tonic. “You’re always in fashion.”

Lianne drank her tea and pulled a face, delicately, and handed the cup back to him. “Let us pray, then, that the seamstresses know what fabric to use for this amount of sweat,” she said, and laid back down. Baird eased the pain in her throat and put her to sleep, and went back to his office.

Adarie of Macayhill met him there. Her curly gray hair was escaping its tie. “It’s not good, your Grace,” she said grimly. “The young ones are starting to get it. Three maids and a stableboy are already dead. It’s spreading among the pages and squires, too. The Nond boy won’t last a week. And you already know how we’re losing healers.”

They looked at each other.

“You sent your wife out of the city?” she asked quietly.

Baird nodded. “And yours?”

Adarie scrubbed her face with her hands. “She and the girls went to Macayhill.”

“Anyone who can is leaving,” said Baird to himself. “But —“ he pulled his most recent stack of papers towards him. “We’ve had _no_ reports of this thing outside of Corus? None?”

“None,” she said.

“Why isn’t it spreading? I mean, I thank the gods that it isn’t. But that’s not what diseases do. They don’t respect borders.”

“Do you feel… drained, when you work with patients?” asked Adarie.

“Utterly,” said Baird, and meant it.

“And it has no clear source, no pattern of infection within the body.”

“None.”

Adarie took a breath. “This isn’t behaving the way a natural disease does, your Grace.”

There was a long moment of awful silence.

“If this was sent to Corus, it’s a declaration of war,” said Adarie quietly. The Macayhills were a military family. She knew what she was talking about.

Baird heard Roald’s voice in his head: _and you know how I like to avoid war._

“I cannot go to the king on suspicion alone,” he said, voice dead.

“You cannot go to _this_ king on suspicion alone,” said Adarie, and her voice sounded a little odd.

He looked up at her very closely. She cleared her throat and shut his office door and leaned on his desk. “You are not the only person the Rogue has come to see,” she said softly. “This town is as much his as it is Roald’s. And his people started dying first.”

“He’s not a healer or a mage,” started Baird.

“He can get _information_ ,” said Adarie, brown eyes glinting, and Baird remembered the rumor that the Macayhills were a family of spies, too.

Reaching the King of the Thieves was a complicated affair. (“I think it’s less that you find him, and more that he finds you,” said Adarie dryly.) It was a week before Baird found a slip of paper with an address slid under his office door. By then, Lianne had improved somewhat, and Baird felt comfortable leaving the palace.

He was dressed for the ride to the Lower City when a footman pounded on the door to his office.

“It’s the prince,” said the footman, eyes wide and scared. “He — he’s taken ill, your Grace.”

Baird went still.

“How ill?” he asked quietly.

“Very ill, your Grace. Past the help of anyone else. They say.”

Baird slowly took off the gloves he’d just put on. George would understand. “Thank you. Please say that I’ll be there in five minutes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if it doesn’t have a gratuitous lesbian OC is it even fanfiction


	3. let's not talk about the vervain

It was the most violent case of the sickness that Baird had seen. When he sunk his Gift into Jonathan’s body, the disease chewed it up before he could have even the barest effect. He wiped the Prince’s face and kept him calm and asleep as much as he could. But the cough got worse and turned black and bloody. Baird gave and gave and gave, and the disease kept taking.

It was an awful two days of trying to keep Jonathan alive. Baird spent every moment in the sickroom, sleeping on a cot next to the prince’s bed. Jonathan would smile tiredly at him when he was awake, but didn’t speak. On the evening of the third day, eyes fuzzy with exhaustion, he took Jonathan’s hands — and nothing happened.

Baird closed his eyes and looked inside himself. His heart dropped horribly. He was empty of his own Gift. The disease had drained him out.

He bowed his head and prayed, prayed, prayed for a green flash.

None came.

He knew there were no healers left in Corus with the strength to combat the progression of Jonathan’s illness. The beautiful prince he’d delivered, whom he’d cared for since the moment he came into this world, the joy of his mother’s life and the pride of this father’s and the hope of the realm, was going to die. Baird had failed.

“Alan,” muttered Jonathan, turning his head on the pillow. “Alan —“

Baird swallowed the lump in his throat and looked up at a footman. “Would you see if Alan of Trebond can be summoned? His Highness wants to see him.”

The footman nodded, and left. A gloved hand gently touched Baird’s shoulder. He looked up to see his favorite priest of the Black God, a huge kind man whom Baird had unfortunately had to see nearly every day for the last month. “Is there nothing more to be done, your Grace?” asked the priest, very gently.

Baird couldn’t bring himself to say it aloud, but he nodded.

The priest and his associates carefully started preparing last rites. They had drawn the curtains closed and lit incense in braziers and were quietly beginning their invocations when the door flew open to admit a furious Alan of Trebond. Myles was right behind him.

“This is ridiculous,” shouted the boy, his light voice cracking. “What on earth are you people thinking? Get these priests out of here. How is he supposed to get better with smoke and noise?”

Baird started to say something about denial being the first step of grief. But then he saw Myles’s face.

The baron looked at him, and looked at Alan, and somehow Baird understood that Alan needed to be given a chance to do whatever it was he was going to do.

Meanwhile, Alan was storming through the room, delivering orders that no one was listening to. The priests looked to Baird. Baird shrugged. The priests nodded and filed out. Alan flung open the curtains and stoked the fire and hauled a stool to Jonathan’s bedside. Baird got out of his way.

“What is he doing?” Baird asked Myles, voice low. “He’s not a healer.”

“He is,” said Myles, voice equally quiet. “He’s been avoiding admitting it. He’d rather fix problems by whacking them with swords. But he’s almost as powerful as you were, at that age.” When the room had emptied out, Myles raised his voice. “Alan, come here. You owe Duke Baird an explanation.”

Alan paused from where he was tucking blankets tightly around the prince’s body and turned around. His hands were fists. He looked like he wanted to refuse, but then Myles tilted his head. Alan’s shoulders slumped. He took a breath.

“There’s something I didn’t tell anyone,” he said. “I — I have the Gift. I’m trained to heal. Our village woman taught me everything she knew.” He glared at Baird, fiercely, like he thought Baird might laugh. Baird didn’t. Village women had more knowledge than most university professors. After a moment, Alan plowed on. “I know I’m not grown up. And I know I’m not fully trained. But I haven’t had all my power drained either. And —“ his voice cracked again. “He’s my _friend_.”

“Loving him will not be enough,” said Baird quietly, feeling his own failure like an abyss in his chest. “Three of my healers are already dead. This disease drained them dry. Can you risk your life against this sorcery?”

“Then you do believe the illness is caused by magic,” said Myles, next to him.

Baird rubbed his eyes. “No natural fever will slay a healer,” he said, hating the words as they came out of his mouth. “And I find it very interesting that only _after_ all the palace healers have been drained of their power does the heir to the throne fall ill.”

“Politics,” said Myles, very softly, and Baird wanted to vomit.

Instead he held his hands out to the boy. “I’m tired, Alan.”

Alan looked at him, knowing it was a test. Then he came forward put his small hands — the hands Baird had healed so often — into Baird’s own. Alan’s nose twitched a few times. His eyes started to water. Then Baird felt power flowing into him.

When Baird closed his eyes, fire filled up the inside of his lids. Alan’s Gift was warm and effervescent and brilliantly violet. It slid into Baird’s feet and knees and lungs and heart and hands, repairing weeks of exhaustion and soothing the arthritis and the eye strain Baird had been ignoring. At the moment Baird could take no more, Alan broke the spell.

Baird opened his eyes, feeling shocked. Alan looked up at him. “My brother always gets tired when we’re hiking,” he said, by way of some sort of explanation.

“Does he,” said Baird, and then let Alan’s hands go. He was stunned. “Well.” He cleared his throat and looked at Myles, and then looked back at the boy.

“Mithros guide him?” murmured Myles.

“Mithros guide you,” Baird told Alan, and decided to sit.

Myles sat next to him as Alan worked. The boy built up the fire, and closed the curtains once more, and stuck his head out of the door and called for hot bricks. Starting with the traditional, Baird noted. When Jonathan stirred awake, gasps hoarse, anxiety in his eyes, Alan poured honey and lemon into him and then sent him back to sleep so deeply and effectively it made Baird and Myles yawn. He packed hot bricks around the prince’s body, wiped sweat from his brow, and muttered to himself.

The hours turned. Alan tried all the spells Baird had, and the cough eased a little, but the fever kept building and building. Jonathan’s lips cracked and bled with the heat. Alan wiped his eyes, furious.

Finally, at midnight, Baird again saw that there was nothing left to do.

Except that Alan thought there was.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a packet. Baird smelled vervain. He felt a terrible truth start to form in the distant reaches of his mind.

“Absolutely not,” said Myles, and stood up. Alan looked at him.

“If you want to leave, you can.” The boy’s voice was very tired, and sounded very old. He opened the packet. “Just bolt the door behind you.”

Myles looked at him, speechless, and then bolted the door anyway and sat back down and put his face in his hands. Baird felt the terrible truth creep closer.

Alan threw the vervain in the fire and knelt in front of it and started to speak quietly. The flames turned purple, and grew hotter and higher, and the moment Baird knew the truth of what Alan was going to do was the moment he did it.

It happened quickly: Alan put his hands straight into the fire. His whole small body immediately blazed a brilliant amethyst. He let out a scream. Myles shuddered.

Then Alan stood. Baird, half-blinded, watched him walk to Jonathan’s side and take his hands. “Jonathan,” he said, but it sounded like a woman’s voice. Myles lifted his head, eyes wide. “Jon. It’s time to come back. Please. Come back with me.”

“Oh, it’s you,” said a man’s voice, a bit like Roald’s, but warmer and deeper. “I knew you’d come.”

“Will you come back with me?” asked the woman’s voice, with the pleading note of a child hidden inside it.

“With you, and for you,” said the man.

Baird and Myles watched as Alan poured endless light into Jonathan, and then watched as the light turned white, and then faded to nothing.

When it was gone, Jonathan turned his head on the pillow and opened his eyes and smiled and took a deep, clean breath. Alan smiled back. Then he closed his beautiful violet eyes and collapsed in a dead faint.

Myles took Alan, limp over his shoulder. Baird changed Jonathan’s bedclothes and put him back to sleep and opened the curtains and banked the fire. He sent word to Roald and Lianne. Then he went to find Myles again. It was two o’clock in the morning. Myles was having a drink.

“Should we talk about what just happened?” Baird asked, voice very low.

“Talk about how an eleven-year-old child opened a doorway to divine power?” said Myles. “Or talk about how that child did so to save the prince from an unnatural disease sent to disable the line of succession? _Or_ talk about how that child is likely now a prime target for whoever sent it?”

Baird looked at Myles. “We could talk about how that child has more business being a healer than being a knight.”

“That child will never listen to you on that count.”

“We _could_ talk about how we’re not referring to that child as a boy, right now,” offered Baird, and Myles took a sharp breath and let it out very slowly.

“I think,” said the baron, “for that child’s sake, we should talk about none of this.”

Both of them were silent for a long moment, and then they shook hands, and Baird left.

Jonathan’s survival coincided with the tide turning on the epidemic as a whole. Within a week the mysterious illness had faded from Corus. Folk went back to dying for only the normal reasons. Lianne and Roald, in gratitude for what they thought was Baird’s success at saving Jonathan’s life, sent a carriage to the Queenscove townhouse with orders that Baird go to Fief Haryse and not come back until his child was born.

Baird went without a word. At Fief Haryse, he told Wilina everything.

They were in her childhood bedroom, which she had refurnished with a much larger bed for this visit. She had stripped off all of her clothes in the warmth of the summer afternoon. Baird laid next to her with one hand her gently swelling belly. She rested her hand on his, and tracked the cracks in the ceiling with her eyes as Baird told her what had happened.

“It’s political,” she said quietly when he was done. “I’m sure of it. Someone sent that illness. Also.” She rolled sideways, reaching off the bed. Baird sighed inwardly as her soft skin slid under his hand and the curve of her hips rose, and then had to re-compose himself when she rolled back holding a piece of paper. “I have this from George Cooper.”

“How did he know you were here?”

“I don’t know. But it’s addressed to both of us. I haven’t read it yet.”

Baird took it. It shared everything George had planned to tell Baird in person, had they been able to meet: that the opals which had come from Carthak to Corus at the start of what was now called the Sweating Sickness had entertained no buyer but the man who had bought them. The trader had been under orders to sell to no one else. He was paid less than half of what the opals were worth. “ ‘One might say the buyer got a deal, were it not for the additional price of his head, collected the next day,’ ” Baird read aloud, and winced. “George still doesn’t know where the opals went, nor who the man was, as his head was missing when they found him.”

Wilina drummed her fingers on top of Baird’s. “I may not have gotten a good convent education, but even I know you can trap power in opals,” she said softly. “So who’s in Carthak?”

Baird turned the letter over. “He’s made a list.”

Wilina pressed her head to Baird’s and they read through it together. George had only deemed a handful of folk worthy, all with some affiliation to the university in Carthak: an exiled Copper Islander, a young Scanran sorcerer, a Carthaki professor, one of the emperor’s war mages, and —

“Oh,” said Wilina. She touched her fingertip to the last name: _Roger of Conté_.

Roger was the king’s nephew, the only son of Roald’s late and beloved older sister. He’d been in Carthak for the past year, exploring advanced magical techniques. “That’s — he shouldn’t be on this list,” said Baird. “Lianne loves him. Roald loves him. _Jonathan_ loves him.”

“Baird,” said Wil very softly. “You know what the line of succession is. Who inherits if Jonathan dies?”

Baird put his hand to his forehead and closed his eyes.

“We need to burn this,” said Wil.

Baird nodded.

Wilina stood, her hair falling down her back in waves, and found a match and burned the letter into the empty hearth. Then she came back to bed. The late afternoon light sank into her skin, and Baird propped himself up on one elbow to look down at her. _She can’t stress herself,_ he thought to himself, _not with the baby on the way —_

She flicked him in the arm. “Stop it.”

“What?”

“You’re diagnosing me. Stop it. I can do politics and pregnancy at the same time.”

Baird sighed, and nodded.

She brought his hand back to her stomach. “When Roger comes back to court, I’m going to watch him like a hawk.”

She _was_ a hawk, with her dark eyes and her sharp mind. Baird pressed his face into her waves of hair, thanking all the gods that she was his wife.

Six months later Wilina stood up calmly in the middle of breakfast with water soaking her skirts. Graeme of Queenscove was in the world and screaming not an hour later. Baird sat on Wil’s bed emitting uncontrollable sparks of green, which appeared to be miniature versions of his flashes, until Wil sent him out of the room to get himself together.

They went back to Corus two months later to find that Roger of Conté had returned to Tortall.

Wilina, true to her word, watched him. She wasn’t alone. George Cooper showed up in their parlor with a gift for the baby and told them that Roger had taken a pleasure cruise on the Olorun, and the net discreetly dragging behind the boat had swept up a quantity of opals and a human skull. Wilina’s Haryse contacts told her that Roger had quietly recruited his own cadre of guards from ex-military men. Harailt of Aili said Roger had started doing obscure tests on advanced university students. Adarie of Macayhill quit after Roger asked her, in a way that was less a question and more a threat, to become his private healer. She took her wife and children to her family fief. (“Working for you has been the joy of my career, but I want to be out of that man’s reach,” she told Baird, firm. “As long as he’s in Corus, I will not be.”) Myles, protective and fatherly in a way Baird had never known him to be before, was perpetually on edge about the way Roger watched Alan.

Roald refused to hear of any of it. Lianne, her health weakened permanently by the Sweating Sickness, refused too. After a few conversations that ended in Roald stone-faced and Lianne weeping, Baird gave up.

Wilina told him to let her and George and Harailt and Myles handle Roger. Baird redirected his energy to teaching Alan of Trebond whenever Alan showed up in his tents or in his healing wards over the next several years. Alan was a formidable healer, but incapable of understanding his own limits. He would work himself to the point of exhaustion if Baird didn’t keep an eye on him. “That’s enough. Your knight-master will have my head if you keel over,” he informed a sixteen-year-old Alan, prying him away from a dying soldier’s bedside.

Jonathan murmured his thanks when Baird delivered Alan to his rooms. He took his half-asleep squire by the shoulders. “Still don’t know how to let things go, hm?” he said, tilting Alan’s face up with fingertips under his chin.

Alan blinked at him and smiled and shook his head, swaying a little. Jonathan chuckled warmly. The last thing Baird saw before the door shut was the prince drawing him close.

Something about the whole interaction made Baird feel like a voyeur.

“Perhaps they’re lovers,” suggested Wilina, when he told her about it.

Baird paused in where he was changing Cathal, their second son, born two years after Graeme. “Oh. Well, that’s a possibility, I suppose.”

She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. She’d spent most of the day rebalancing the Queenscove accounts, and also running some sort of errand for George that Baird knew to not ask too much about. She propped her chin on her hands and watched him carefully re-pin their toddler’s diaper.

“What a pity it was _we_ weren’t teenage lovers,” she murmured, eyes twinkling.

He smiled and put Cathal’s socks on his little chubby feet, avoiding sleepy kicks. “I think I needed to be fully grown to tangle with you. You would have been the death of me at sixteen.”

She came from around the desk and helped him pull a nightshirt over Cathal’s head. “Tell me,” she said.

He cleared his throat. His cheeks were hot. She did really know how to turn him sideways, even when she was helping him dress their slobbery little boy. “Wilina, I can hardly handle you in bed _now._ ”

She leaned close to him. “Husband, you _handle_ me just fine.”

Something about the way she said it made him find her twenty minutes later in the darkened hallway outside the nursery and get his hand up her skirts and hold her against the wall until she came, laughing silently, all over his fingers.

George Cooper made semi-regular visits to House Queenscove. (If someone had told a younger Baird that he’d someday be friends with the King of the Thieves, he’d have diagnosed you with a psychiatric condition. But this was what happened when you married someone like Wilina.) At the end of one evening, Wil had gone upstairs to check on the children, and George was preparing to leave, and Baird’s curiosity got the best of him.

“What do you know about a young man in the palace named Alan of Trebond?” he asked.

George paused. His hand was on the door. He turned back to look at Baird, and his eyes were lit with something that looked a little like affection. “I know a few things,” he said, in his casual way.

Baird cleared his throat. There was so much to know. The mysterious purple-eyed cat who followed Alan around. The glowing ember he wore around his neck. The sword he’d pulled out of the ruins on Myles’ property. The way Jonathan looked at him. The night with the vervain and the fire that Myles and Baird still didn’t talk about.

“Would you like to tell me any of those things?” Baird asked.

“I wouldn’t,” said George, smiling, and left.


	4. excuse me what / that's quite enough

Alan of Trebond moved into his last year of squiredom with a reputation as the most serious and deadly fighter the realm had seen in years. Baird didn’t pay attention. He was too busy trying to keep Lianne alive.

No matter what Baird did she got slowly thinner and slowly weaker. Her asthma took a bizarre turn, and she was wracked with coughing fits, spitting up clear water even when she hadn't drunk in hours. At night Baird laid awake in bed, trying to figure out what he was doing wrong, swamped by feelings of dread and failure.

“You are doing the best you can, my love,” murmured Wilina very gently, curled towards him, holding his hand.

“I just know there’s something I’m not seeing,” whispered Baird. He stared into the dark. Why did it feel like someone had a blindfold over his eyes?

The day Alan of Trebond passed the Ordeal and was knighted, Baird was in his office. The Queen’s health had continued to decline, and was reaching a tipping point. Baird was carefully siphoning the last of a restorative tonic he’d ordered from Tyra into a small glass bottle when his door blew open.

“Just a moment,” said Baird, not looking up from his task.

When the vial was capped, he lifted his head. His wife and George Cooper stood in the doorway. Wilina was pale.

“You have to come the Great Throne Room,” she said. “Roger made a poppet of Lianne. Alan of Trebond found it and accused him of treason. There’s going to be a duel.”

Baird went very still. “I’m sorry. Roger did what?”

“He made a figure of the Queen and left it under a running fountain,” said George, quietly. “He made a few others — yourself included — and wrapped them in a veil. Not subtle sorcery, but effective. Looks like it’s been happening for months.”

Baird set his hands on his worktable. He thought about how blind he’d felt for months. He thought about Lianne coughing up water and wasting to nothing. “He was drowning her alive,” he whispered.

“I don’t know how Alan knew to find them,” said Wil. “But Roger is furious. He called the duel immediately. He said the gods will find him innocent.”

“They will not,” Baird said quietly. His rage was a clear crystal floating at the center of his horror. “They will not.”

“I hope you’re right, or it’s Alan’s life,” said George. He glanced out of Baird’s door and tugged up the hood of his cloak. “The lad’s torn up after his Ordeal. I’ve got to go find him.”

Baird and Wilina went to the Great Throne Room. “How does George know Alan?” he asked her, voice low, as they entered. She was holding his hand tight enough to hurt, and he knew she was doing it to keep him grounded.

“I think Alan has more friends than we think,” she murmured. Her dark eyes darted around the room as she led them to a seat. “And maybe more secrets.”

Baird started to ask her what she meant, but then the doors at the far end of the room opened, and Alan walked in. His sword was out. He looked exhausted. Baird narrowed his eyes: the young man’s hands were bandaged, and he was holding himself stiffly. One of these days Baird was going to have a firm conversation with the Chamber of the Ordeal and the pointless physical damage it liked to inflict.

Roger of Conté, blue eyes wild, took his place across from Alan. A herald read the challenge. They lifted their swords and began.

Baird didn’t watch them. He couldn’t. He’d never had the stomach to watch two men maim each other’s bodies for the sake of slights that were so often imaginary. The custom was barbaric. He gripped Wilina’s hand and stared down at his knees. It was easy enough to track the fight by its metal-on-metal sounds, by the swells of reaction in the audience, and by Roger himself, breathing harshly and spitting curses. Alan was as silent as a ghost.

Suddenly, next to him, Wilina inhaled sharply. There was a metal-on-stone clatter, and then Roald called “ _Halt!”_

Baird picked up his head. Alan had dropped to a crouch. Roger had dropped his sword. The Duke’s eyes were wide with shock.

Alan straightened. His shirt had been sliced open from collar to hem. He held its edges together as he pulled a bloodstained corset out from underneath. Then he turned sideways. Baird blinked.

Alan had breasts.

Roald stood up on the dais, looking furious. Roger’s jaw was on the floor. Alan’s cheeks were red. The crowd burst into outcry.

Baird couldn’t track much after that. Alan disappeared momentarily into a side room. A slender man who looked exactly like him stood up and commanded everyone’s attention. (“There are _two_ of them?” Baird whispered, feeling like he’d lost the plot; “twins,” murmured Wilina, whom Baird suspected had known the plot all along.) The young man, resplendent and theatrical in a way Alan never was, asked Their Majesties to excuse his sister’s behavior. (“ _Sister_ ,” Baird squeaked. Wilina smiled.)

Alan returned to the throne room with her torn shirt tucked into her breeches as her brother, whose name was Thom, continued explaining the story of their childhood and their switch. Jonathan, Myles, and Duke Gareth’s son all confessed to knowing Alan’s true sex. Roald looked like he’d swallowed a reptile. Roger looked like he was becoming one.

Suddenly, the Duke of Conté lunged. Someone shrieked. Alan brought her sword up just in time. The fight was on again.

This time it was different. Alan was fast and talented but Roger’s desperation made him brutal. Alan gripped her slender sword with both hands, eyes wide and focused, and darted and dove and dodged to save herself.

Baird smelled the magic before he saw it. He seized Wilina’s hand again. “Don’t, _don’t_ —“ he whispered, but it was too late. A bitter orange cloud of fire exploded out of Roger’s body. It reached for Jonathan and Roald at the same time. Lianne cried out and threw herself sideways in front of her husband. Gareth yanked his nephew back. But the cloud stretched on, rank as sulfur mustard, ready to blister and shred the lungs of anyone who breathed it in, ready to kill, Baird half-got to his feet but Wilina seized him —

Alan struck. There was a scream, and the cloud halted in its path, shimmering sickly. Alan struck again, and this time there was a spray of blood.

The orange cloud faded like a bruise to show Roger of Conté sprawled on the marble floor, bleeding out throat-first.

The Great Throne Room was silent. Roald was ashen. Lianne had her hand over her face and was leaning against him. Jonathan stood beside his parents on the dais, eyes glittering.

Alan looked across the room. Baird followed her gaze to where George was standing, half-hidden in the shadows, with Myles. George gave Alan a nod. Alan nodded back. Then she lowered her sword and sank to her knees.

Wilina released Baird. Baird stood up.

He felt his hands glowing slightly, in that comforting way they did when there was work to be done. The silent crowd parted for him. No one stopped him as he walked to Alan, kneeling alone in the center of the room.

When he touched her shoulder she lifted her bloody face and looked up at him unsteadily. Her eyes were wary. Well, she hadn’t had a very good track record with dukes in the last hour. “Your Grace?” she said, voice rasping.

He held out a green-lit hand. “You have wounds that need tending.”

Alan stared at him for a long moment. Then she held out her arms and let Baird help her to her feet.

There was a rumble from the crowd, and muttering and talking that started to get louder, and an anxious shifting of bodies, and doors opening and slamming, and the sound of someone sobbing, and someone else retching, and the talking grew louder still —

“My love,” said Wilina at his shoulder. She did know how to move quickly. “Get Sir Alanna out of here. It’s about to get political.”

“ _Politics_ ,” muttered Alan and Baird at the same time.

“I have that tonic you made for Lianne,” said Wil, and oh, Goddess _bless_ her presence of mind. “I’ll tell Roald to get her back to her rooms.”

“Tell Roald to take some of it, too. He needs it. And make Jonathan sit down and eat a piece of toast.”

“Jonathan,” murmured Alan, her violet eyes searching worriedly for the prince.

“He’s fine for now,” Baird told her sternly. “ _You_ , on the other hand, have a belly wound, and we all know how those go, so you need to come with me.”

“Your Grace,” said an anxious court official. Baird and Alan and Wilina looked at him. He was pointing to Roger. “Perhaps he’s still — what’s the procedure? —“

Baird looked at Roger of Conté with distaste for a long moment.

“The procedure is called cremation,” he said at last.

Wilina’s smile was fierce. She touched Alan’s shoulder, and kissed Baird’s cheek, and went swiftly to the dais.

Baird steered Alan out of the Great Throne Room and directly to his office. He unlocked the door to let them in, locked it behind him, then motioned Alan towards his examining table. He cleaned his hands thoroughly and turned around. Then he stopped.

Alan hadn’t sat down on the table. Instead she was braced against it, bloodied hands gripping the edge behind her. She was watching him guardedly, maybe even a little fearfully.

Baird carefully lowered his hands and took a few steps backwards.

“You know I see female patients all the time,” he said, trying to keep his voice gentle. “You yourself have assisted me with them. The Chief Healer’s duties of course go beyond lines of what’s considered polite between men and women, but they always remain within the scope of professional need. I am only here to take care of your injuries and make sure you are able to rest. We will talk of nothing else.”

She didn’t say anything.

Baird continued. “However, I recognize that this is an extraordinary circumstance. I don’t want you to feel unsafe. Is there someone you want in the room with you? A woman, perhaps? I am sure that my wife would be happy to be here, after she’s done with their Majesties.”

Her mouth flattened into a tight line. She nodded once, jerkily. Baird nodded as well. “I’ll see if I can go get her, and we’ll wait til —“

For the second time that day, his door blew open. The tension in Alan’s shoulders and hands immediately released, and her eyes filled with relief. “Hello,” she said, smiling, as Baird turned around.

“How do you have keys to my office?” demanded Baird.

“Wilina gave me hers,” said George, tossing them to Baird. “Hello, darlin’ girl,” he said to Alan, and crossed the room and took her face in his hands and kissed her.

Baird decided to busy himself putting the keys securely in his pocket and unnecessarily washing his hands a second time while George quietly said a number of very specific things to Alan and kissed her some more. By the time he turned around, George had dropped into a chair by the side of the examining table, and Alan had consented to sit on the table itself. Her cheeks were very pink.

“Another one of the Chief Healer’s duties is the protection of sensitive patient information,” said Baird mildly, looking at neither of them. “Which is to say, what happens in my office stays in my office.”

Alan turned a little bit pinker. George grinned. “Lie down, please,” Baird told Alan, and she did.

Baird carefully peeled back the sides of her torn shirt. The wound wasn’t nearly as bad as he had thought, although it ran the length of her torso, from sternum to her low belly. Baird felt a wave of anger at Roger: he hadn’t wanted her to die as much as he’d wanted her to suffer. If she hadn’t been wearing that corset, the slice would have meant a slow death involving blood poisoning. But as it was — he pushed his anger away to focus — it was shallow, and would be easy to fix.

He had just cleaned off the blood — both hers and Roger’s — and finished a delicate disinfectant spell when there was another knock at the door. He sighed and straightened up, reaching for a cloth to keep Alan decent.

George looked at the door. His eyes shifted a bit in the way that they did sometimes, and he said “it’s Jon.“ Before Baird could quite register that the King of the Thieves was on a nickname basis with the Crown Prince of Tortall, and could also see through doors, George had gotten up.

Jonathan came in, face pale, and immediately went to Alan, who was certainly not decent but didn’t seem to feel the need to be, in front of either Jonathan or George. “Alanna —“ Jonathan said, voice hushed, and then heavens above _he_ was kissing her too. Baird turned around and washed his hands for a third time and thought about a few things, including how he should probably start using Alan’s true name.

When he turned back around Jon had taken a seat at the other end of the examining table. “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner,” he said. “Baird’s wife was making me eat toast.”

“How is your mother?” asked Baird, standing over Alanna and gently drawing a long, thin line of green fire down her wound.

“Mother’s fine, but shaken,” said Jonathan, watching Baird work. “As is Father. It will take them some time to process it.” He looked down. “It will take all of us some time to process it.”

Alanna swallowed, staring at the ceiling. George took her hand and squeezed it. Baird continued drawing his line, focusing on knitting the edges of the wound cleanly back together. “We are very fortunate that we’re processing Roger’s death and not Lianne’s,” he said quietly.

Jonathan looked at him sharply, like he was about to say something; and then he sat back in his chair and nodded, instead. George gave Baird an approving look.

He finished the line, below Alanna’s navel, and reviewed his work. She’d have a scar, but it would heal without infection. He bandaged it well and then folded her torn shirt back over her, crossing its halves.

He had shifted his attention to Alanna’s torn-up hands when there was yet another knock. But this knock was familiar. “That would be Wilina. Would you mind if—” started Baird, but Alanna was already nodding. “In here, Wil,” he called.

She came inside and locked the door behind her. He glanced over his shoulder and met her eyes with a relieved smile, feeling his shoulders relax, the same way Alanna’s had when George had arrived. She smiled back.

“Your Highness,” said Wil, and curtseyed to the prince, who stood and bowed accordingly.

“Your Majesty,” said Wil, curtseying to George. Jonathan made a choked, shocked noise. George, sprawled in his chair, gave Wil a lusty wink and told her she was looking lovely.

“I would thank you to not flirt with my wife quite so much in front of me,” Baird told him absently, squinting at Alanna’s left palm.

“If you know him at all, as it seems you _do_ , you’ll know he can’t help himself,” said Jonathan acidly.

“Don’t start,” sighed Alanna.

“Sir Alanna, I’ve brought you a change of clothes,” said Wilina, ignoring all of them and unfolding an armful of fabric to lay it on Baird’s desk. “Your brother has strong opinions about your attire, and bade me bring options from his personal wardrobe.”

“Please tell me it’s not velvet,” said Alanna, turning her head on the table to look. “He loves velvet.”

“It is unfortunately velvet, and heavily embroidered,” said Wilina. “I took the liberty of procuring a few more neutral options.”

“Thank you,” said Alanna fervently.

Baird moved on to fixing Alanna’s right hand. Wilina shook out a plain linen shirt. Jonathan and George shot looks at each other. Within a few minutes, they’d all done their jobs.

Baird helped Alanna to sitting and rested his hands on her shoulders. He let his Gift trickle through her, inspecting. “How often did you wear a corset like the one you had on today?”

“Every day for the last five years,” she said.

“Did you sleep in it?”

“No,” said Alanna and Jonathan at the same time, and Baird felt rather than saw Wilina have a very subtle _I knew it_ reaction in Baird’s general direction. “Well, not unless we were on the road,” clarified Alanna.

Baird checked her ribs and her lungs and the muscles in her back, thinking. Then he asked: “will you continue to wear it?”

Alanna blinked at him. “Oh. I hadn’t thought about that.”

He nodded. “I understand it may be safer for you to do so, in some parts of the country, or if you venture further afield,” he said, stepping back. “But I’m concerned about its effects on your lung capacity and your ribcage. You’re very strong, so you’ve been all right so far. But if you can, try not to wear it for more than eight hours at a time. And try not to sleep in it.”

Alanna nodded.

She let Wilina fasten a woman’s breastband around her and then pulled a clean shirt over her head. Baird made her drink a glass of water. Then there was _another_ knock at the door, slightly hammering.

“Myles,” murmured George, his eyes shifting again, and Wilina opened it.

Myles stood in the doorway and stared at Alanna for a long time. She stared back at him, stubborn.

“I am very proud of you and you must never do something like that again,” he told her at last.

“No promises,” said Alanna, and Myles smiled. His attention shifted to Baird.

“How is she?”

“She’ll be just fine,” said Baird, putting things away. “She’ll need to rest for a few days and not stretch the wound. It won’t scar badly.”

“We’ll go to the Olau townhouse,” said Myles. “Things in the palace are going to be a little…”

“Political?” supplied George.

Myles looked at him. “Yes, political. Hello, George. How do you plan on walking out of the palace with your life intact? These halls are crawling with the Provost’s men as of half an hour ago. Roald called an investigation into Roger’s activities.”

“I got him in, so I can get him out,” said Wil decisively. “Nobody stops the Duchess of Queenscove.”

George grinned. Alanna and Myles and Jonathan looked at Wil, impressed. Baird quietly closed the caps on a series of vials to distract himself from how desperately he wanted to kiss her. There had been quite enough kissing in his office for one day.

Their plans were decided. Myles took Alanna; Jonathan returned to his parents; and George pulled up the hood of his cloak again and slipped out the door with Wil.

Then he heard Wil say “just a moment, please.” She reappeared in the office.

She and Baird looked at each other for a long moment.

Then Wil got right up against him and shouldered him into his desk and kept him there. “You are _wonderful,_ ” she told him, voice very low.

“Oh, well —“ started Baird, attempting to deflect.

“No. Listen to me. She would have been pulled apart in that room if you hadn’t made it very clear where you stood. You _handled_ it.” Her eyes were shining. “I love it when you handle things.”

Baird tried to speak but he was very distracted by how warm Wilina was against him and how good she smelled and the way her hands were sneaking up the sides of his body and the fact that he could see the beautiful soft expanse of skin that rippled over her collarbones and, and, well, it had been _quite_ _a day_ —

“I’m going home,” she said. “I’m going to take a bath. I won't get dressed afterwards. I will put on the emeralds because I know what that does to you. I will be in our bed. I will be waiting.”

Baird thought his knees might give out.

She pecked him chastely on the lips and disappeared again.


End file.
